Tantric
culture arose within what one could call the 'Sanskrit
cosmopolis', a transcultural formation
focused on literary (not spoken), Sanskrit. As such, tantric traditions
arose during the early centuries of the common era, developing in Buddhist,
Jain and Hindu contexts.

From the early
medieval period to the rise of the Delhi Sultanate, the history of India
is characterised in political terms by the development of feudal kingdoms
and of the increasing awareness of regional identity with the rise of important
regional centres focused on temples and the development of region-specific
styles of art and architecture.

After the collapse
of the Gupta empire and generally from the mid-eighth century, kingdoms
such as those of the Rastrakutas in the Deccan, an early form of the Rajputs
called the Gurjura-Pratiharas of Malava-Rajasthan, and the Palas of Bengal,
were engaged in bitter rivalry; kings and princes pursued policies of military
adventurism and an ideology of warfare developed, which became, a facet
of the erotic play of king, who was understood as the manifestation of
a divinity. The king, as divine, was the male consort of the land represented
by the Goddess. Tribal and clan power developed during this period, with
Brahmans being given land in return for legitimising the new rulers and
instigating a process of Sanskritisation whereby local customs and deities
became integrated into the overarching, Brahmanical paradigm.

The vast body
of tantric texts however are inseparable from the traditions that gave
rise to them. Saiva, Vaisnava and Sakta Tantras were believed by their
followers to have been revealed by Visnu, Siva, and the Goddess (Devi),
and there were even Tantras revealed by the Sun (Sarya), now lost,
whose followers were called Sauras. (See Alexis Sanderson, “Saivism and
the Tantric Traditions”, in S. Sutherland (ed.), The World's Religions
, London, 1988, pp. 660-704.)

There were also
Jain Tantras believed to be the word of Mahavira and, above all, Buddhist
Tantras believed to be the word of the Buddha, which became incorporated
into the vast Buddhist canon between c. 400 and 750 CE, to this day integral
to the living traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. Using the term `Hindu' to
refer to the Saiva, Sakta Vaisnava and Saura material is anachronistic
as the term was used by the Persians simply to denote the peoples of the
subcontinent. The historian Srivara, who was at the court of Sultan Zain-ul-abidin
(r. 1420-70) was the first to use the term to distinguish people in Kashmir,
who shared certain cultural values and practices (such as cremation of
the dead, veneration of the cow, styles of cuisine and dress, or shared
narratives) from Muslims (`Yavanas'). And for the very first use of the
term in 16th century Bengal, see J.T O'Connell, `The Word "Hindu" in Gaudiya
Vaisnava Texts (journal of the American Oriental Society 93/3,1973, PP.
340-44.) But as Julius Lipner, points out in Ancient Banyan: An Inquiry
into the Meaning of "Hinduness"' ( Religious Studies 32,1996, pp. 109-26)
it was not a common designation until the nineteenth century.

But the theistic
Tantras and traditions, those of Visnu, Siva and the Goddess, are interrelated
and share common structures of practice and belief that can be distinguished
from those of the Buddhists and Jains by their proximity to the Vedas,
orthodox Brahmanical revelation, and their interpreters. Thus the term
'tantric tradition' refers to those religions, that claimed to develop
from textual sources referring to themselves as 'tantras', regarded as
revelation, the word of God, by their followers. This diverse tantric revelation
must be seen in contrast to the ancient, orthodox Brahmanical revelation
or the Veda that the Tantras reject completely or accept as a lower level
of scriptural authority.

In contrast
to the Hindu Tantras, the Buddhist Tantras do not respond to the vedic
tradition but rather look to Mahayana Buddhism and see themselves as a
development of it, even though much Buddhist tantric material, the Yogini
Tantras, was probably derived from Saiva prototypes.

Arriving at
definitions of 'Tantra' and 'Tantrism' has been notoriously difficult and
has varied between presenting external accounts of a phenomenon named `Tantrism'
and internal accounts of what the term tantra refers to. An important indigenous
distinction is between tantrika, a follower of the Tantras, and vaidika,
a follower of the Vedas. This distinction operates across the sectarian
divides of Saivas, Vaisnavas and so on. The former refers to those who
follow a system of ritual and teaching found within the Tantras, in contrast
to those, especially the Brahman caste, who follow the Veda as primary
revelation or iruti (and so called Srautas), or who follow the later texts
of secondary revelation called smrti (and so called Smartas).The issue
is complicated, however, by some vedic Brahmans, particularly Smartas,
observing tantric rites and some texts in the vedic tradition, namely Upanisads,
being clearly tantric in character, `which tantrika authors (Bhaskararaya,
for example) consider as confirming the validity of tantric teachings and
practices.

Early Western
scholars like for example M. Eliade during the 1950’s presented Tantrism
in terms of a list of characteristics, such as locating a bipolar energy
within the body, while others have offered more precise definitions. So
for example the thesis presented by Ron Davidson in the context of tantric
Buddhism is that the central `sustaining metaphor' of the Mantrayana, or
tantric Buddhism, is that the path of the practitioner is akin to the path
of the king on his way to becoming an overlord (rajadhirdja) or universal
monarch (cakravartin), expressed through the forms of consecration, self-visualisation,
mandalas and ‘esoteric acts'.( Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A
Social History of the Tantric Movement, Columbia University Press, 2002,
p. 121. Tantra as a quest for power has also been emphasised by Brunner
in 'Le sadhaka, personnage oublie de l'Inde du Sud', Journal Asiatique,
1975, PP. 411-43.)

Davidson's account
of Tantrism in terms of power is important and it is surely germane to
point to the political dimensions of the tantric practitioner that have
been generally neglected or ignored (probably partly due to the clear separation
of `politics' from `religion' that has, rightly or wrongly, characterised
Western scholarship). The practitioner, in Davidson's reading of the texts,
seeks to assume kingship and exercise dominion. We could, however, read
this in a slightly different way, that the central tantric metaphor is
indeed, as Tsong-ka-pa identified, divinisation and that the model of kingship
- the king undergoing consecration and so on - is in fact the king becoming
divine. The divinisation of the king through ritual consecration is directly
akin to the divinisation of the icon in a temple and the divinisation of
the practitioner in daily ritual (or even the divinisation in possession).
More fundamental than the metaphor of kingship is the metaphor of transformation
into a deity. The idea that to worship a god one must become a god is a
notable feature of all tantric traditions, even ones which maintain a dualist
metaphysics.The empowering of the body, which means its divinisation, is
arguably the most important quality in tantric traditions, but a quality
that is only specified within particular traditions and texts.

Becoming divine
is an ancient trope in Indian civilisation. With reference to the consecration
of the vedic king, it is fundamental `that the worshipper becomes one with
the god to whom the worship is addressed. Tantric ritual reflects this
general idea but is text- and tradition-specific in terms of content and
in the explicit focus on the divinisation of the body as the enactment
of its revelation.

The practitioner
in ritual contexts becomes divine such that his or her limited subjectivity
is transcended or expanded and that subjectivity becomes coterminous with
the subjectivity of his or her deity, which is to say that the text is
internalised and subjectivity becomes text-specific. This is clearly in
line with Tsongka-pa's understanding in a Buddhist context and also makes
sense in a theistic `Hindu' one. (Tsong-ka-pa, Tantra in Tibet: The Great
Exposition of Secret Mantra, trans. and ed. J. Hopkins, vol. 1, London,1977,
pp. 64-6.)

While the idea
of liberation as becoming one with the absolute (brahman) has a long history
in Brahmanical thinking from the Upanisads, the ritual construction of
the body as the deity through the use of magical phrases or mantras is
proto-typically tantric.(See also Satapatha Brahmana 1.1.1.4-5 about the
self becoming divine, passing from men to the gods. Julius Eggeling (trans.),
The Satapatha Brahmana, vol. 1, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 12 ,Oxford,
1982.)

In a broader
sense, the tantric traditions are examples of forms of practice and reflection
handed down through generations which locate themselves historically by
reference to a foundational text or group of texts, believed to originate
in a, transcendent source. This is, of course, true of many traditions
including Islam, Judaism and Christianity, as well as vedic tradition.
But while this is a general point, it is nevertheless an important one,
for processes of identification and entextualisation can be identified
within wider scriptural traditions that are also typical of tantric traditions.

Scriptural traditions
all developed before modernity and before the Kantian understanding of
the self as an autonomous agent; an idea that connects with the notion
of the citizen who has civic responsibilities yet who remains distinct
from the social body and an individuality that comes to stand against tradition.
In scriptural traditions, such a notion has been alien, and the self is
an index of a tradition-specific subjectivity, formed in particular ways
in conformity to tradition. In scriptural traditions, the self is constructed
through ritual and the development of a tradition-specific interiority
or variable indexicality that is not individual in the contemporary, de-traditionalised
sense (characterised by fragmentation and alienation). Scripture-sanctioned
rituals serve as identity markers for communities in medieval India, and,
although these boundaries can be transgressed, such transgression always
assumes their existence.

The self in
such communities is bounded by text and ritual. Such a tradition-specified
self, develops philosophy as a craft or techne and needs to develop his
or herself into a particular kind of person if he or she is to move towards
a knowledge of the truth about his or her good and the human good. Tantra
thus can itself be seen in terms of techne, and the suffix tra expresses
the means or instrument of an action expressed by a verbal root. Thus as
mantra might be rendered `instrument of thought, so tantra might literally
be taken to mean `method or instrument of extension', perhaps with the
implication that it is the self or body that is extended to become coterminous
with the divine body.

In other words,
the tantric body is encoded in tradition-specific and text-specific ways.
The practitioner inscribes the body through ritual and forms of interiority
or asceti­cism, and so writes the tradition on to the body. Such transformative
practices are intended to create the body as divine. This inscribing the
body is also a reading of text and tradition. Indeed, the act of reading
is of central importance in the tantric traditions. The fact that the texts
were written is important and has sometimes been underestimated in focusing
on orality/aurality in the transmission of texts.

The (sanskrit)
texts were intended to be read and heard by those with the requisite authority,
to be brought to life, and to be performed. The importance of the written
word here is evident from the commentaries upon the primary texts by the
later tradition. The importance of reading the texts is further suggested
by the presence of ritual manuals (paddhatis), `cookbooks' that served
to instruct and remind practitioners about how to undertake particular
kinds of performance and about particular tenets of a system. The tantric
body, constructed as a public act (even if limited in its public nature
through secrecy), is in turn `read' by traditional practitioners in so
far as some tantrikas wore external signs of their cultic affiliation while
others disparaged such signs, retaining their tantric affiliation as 'secret';
such secrecy is an overcoding of the body.

That is, while
some tantric traditions overtly reject vedic tradition and normative, caste
and feudal society of medieval India, most must be seen as adding their
own writing of the body on to the traditional vedic writing or as reconfiguring
the vedic tradition in terms of the tantric. We see this, for example,
in the Saiva traditions of Kashmir accounted for by Abhinavagupta
(c. 975-1025 CE). For him, tantric rites were supererogatory to vedic practice.
The body, the vedic body, is overwritten by the practitioner who constructs
a tantric body through a further superimposition of rites and the internalisation
of a tantric ideology. Thus, in his famous statement (probably a standard
saying), Abhinavagupta writes that externally one follows vedic practice,
in the domestic sphere one is an orthodox Saiva, but in one's secret life
one is a follower of the extreme antinomian cult of the Kula which involves
the disruption of the vedic body through ritual transgression of vedic
norms and values.

There is much
speculation about the origins of Tantrism. On the one hand the origins
have been seen in an autochthonous spirituality or Shamanism (see below)
that reaches back to pre-Aryan times in the subcontinent, yet textual historical
evidence only dates from a more recent period. While certainly there are
elements in tantric traditions that may well reach back into pre-history
- particularly the use of skulls and the themes of death and possession.Tantrism as
I pointed out, must however be understood as a predominantly Brahmanical,
Sanskritic tradition with its roots in the Veda. In his book on the origins
of Indian civilisation, Bernard Sergent has argued that our main resources
for understanding the past are linguistic and archaeological.(Sergent,
Genese de l'Inde,Paris, 1997, p.10.) There is no early archaeological evidence
for tantric traditions beyond the common era, and while there is textual
evidence for a cremation ground asceticism as far back as the time of the
Buddha, as well as tantric-like goddesses in the Veda, the specificity
of the tantric revelation appears more recently in the history of South
Asia.

However traditions
are constantly reconfigured in the light of contemporary situations and
there is no reason to think that the tantric traditions are any different.
While of course receiving forms of practice and ideas handed down from
the past, the Tantras at the time of their composition were a new revelation
that transcended the older, vedic texts.

Second/the tantric
traditions are regarded as a revelation from a transcendent source and
the texts describe the `descent of the Tantra' (tantravatdra) from a pure,
divine origin but becoming eroded in the course of its descent to the human
world, where it is sometimes presented as a particular (visesa) or esoteric
revelation for the few with the qualification (adhikdra) to receive it,
in contrast to the exoteric, vedic scriptures. Third, the Tantras need
to be seen in a `scale of texts' in which a text is positioned in relation
to others usually in a hierarchy. Tantras thus, present themselves in a
scale of revelation, relegating other traditions to lower levels of this
revelation and reading the earlier traditions through the lens of their
own revelation. There is a high degree of intentionality in the scale of
Tantras such that if a text does not deal with the details of a particular
topic, it is assumed that this is covered elsewhere.

Finally, we
need to understand the anonymous Tantras (and some related texts with named
authors) as having a composite authorship, and so when speaking about the
intentionality of a text or `author' of a text we are not speaking in terms
of authorial intention in the usual sense. To give an example, we
can say that according to vedic exegesis, the Mimarnsa, revelation is a
system of signs that points to a transcendent meaning. This revelation
has no author, and so that transcendent meaning must be understood in terms
of its inner intentionality and is therefore self-validating. Nyaya, by
contrast, refuted the atheism of Mimamsa and proposed God as the author
of the Veda. The Tantras are closer to the Nyaya perspective and are interestingly
defended by the Nyaya philosopher Jayantha Bhatt.

Next, in
part
2 of this series I will turn to various issues
like Kingship, the purification of the body, possesion and and most important
the secret ,inner practices.